Spread the Word: Case Closed

January 17, 2024

I was delighted to be commended in Spread the Word’s crime writing competition, run in partnership with the C&W Literary Agency. The full announcement is here with details about the contest and the selected authors. I was particularly interested in the winner Liz Cornell’s legal murder mystery, which sounds brilliantly written and I hope I can read a published copy of it one day soon. 

It has been a while since I did one of these updates. Over at Shiny New Books there are reviews of books that have interested me over the last couple of years:

– Skylark, Alice O’Keefe‘s novel about the spycops scandal;

– RV Raman’s country house murder mystery, A Will to Kill;

– My Monticello, by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson;

– Kalina Pickhart’s novel of the Maidan, I Will Die in a Foreign Land;

– The recent epic of family and capitalism, Age of Vice by Deepti Kapoor;

– Priya Guns’s gig economy barnstormer, Your Driver is Waiting;

– Southern gothic mystery The Kingdoms of Savannah, by George Dawes Green;

– Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.

Update: The Bookseller reports on the prize.

Posted in Articles, Fiction, Northern Hinterlands, Writing | 1 Comment »

Junkyard Wilderness

January 1, 2024

Until I read this book, I thought the Ozarks were just in Missouri. This was because my only knowledge of the region came from the TV show ‘Ozark’. Wiki tells me that the mountain region also covers north Arkansas, and it is there that Eli Cranor‘s novel takes place. 

The small town of Taggard can trace its decline to the loss of the nuclear power plant, which closed after ‘the reactor scare back in 1999. The sirens had wailed, sending the entire town into the surrounding Ozark Mountains. Turns out, there wasn’t a problem with the reactor, just a faulty alarm system.’ After the plant closed, ‘Taggard became a ghost town with barely ten thousand residents’ and things got worse from there:

A chicken plant popped up in the aftermath, a sprawling compound similar to Nuclear One but filthier. What jobs the plant had to offer went to men and women who didn’t mind getting their hands dirty, immigrants who’d work for pennies and didn’t ask questions. Wasn’t long before racially charged factions like the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Steel, and the White Arkansas Resistance, or W.A.R. for short, started forming across the Ozarks… Times had most definitely changed in Taggard, but the cooling tower still stood ancient and imposing out on the edge of Lake Dardanelle, a totem of days gone past.

In this febrile moonscape Jeremiah must raise his granddaughter Jo, left in his care after her father Jake was sentenced to life for murder. Eighteen years later, he has managed it – Jo is a grown woman with college acceptance letters and even a good shot at being crowned Homecoming Queen at the graduation ceremony on the football field. The story begins at this event, and Jeremiah, who rarely leaves the junkyard he operates for a living, is considerably nervous at the graduation, full of townspeople he feels are judging him. His fear and resentment are palpable. Jo doesn’t make Homecoming Queen – the title goes to the daughter of some local bigwig – but Jo doesn’t care: she leaves the event with her football hero boyfriend. Shortly afterwards, she is kidnapped – and then begins the real story of Ozark Dogs: it’s not so much about a postindustrial community as the mountains, rivers and lakes themselves. 

In James Dickey’s Deliverance, four men from the Georgia suburbs take a two-day canoe trip into the river wilderness. Things go awry when they are jumped by two locals with shotguns. The city men are lost in the wilderness, and tested by this unfamiliar terrain. In Ozark Dogs, the characters are mostly local people who know the landscape well – but it’s still a long terrible night for everyone concerned. Jo is brave and smart enough to escape the neo-Nazis who kidnapped her, but the Ozark river is a far greater challenge. The novel is a long night running wildly through dark forests. 

Ozark Dogs is a Western novel. The characters are distinctive, brilliantly written but, well, kind of Western. There is a hardass Mare of Easttown style woman sheriff. A hooker with a heart. Generic cartel bad guys. Moody fatalism and the weight of the past. Family feuds that go on for generations.

Bunn Ledford is an old-school Klansman who also cooks meth. His face is half ruined from an explosion in his makeshift lab. While Bunn is ‘leading revivals way up in the hills, preaching the gospel of white supremacy to a meth-mouthed congregation’ his son Evail, the real villain of the story, has yet more sinister ideas on how to grow the Ledford business and help his family dominate the region. Jeremiah himself is a Vietnam war veteran and a recovering alcoholic, haunted by guilt and grief. 

We return briefly to civilisation when Evail sends his henchman, Dime, to find a woman called Lacey Brewer. He discovers Lacey in a cheap motel, ‘face deep in the lower fold of a fat man’ – the same man whose daughter took the Homecoming title from Jo, earlier in the evening. Dime tosses out the fat man and hits Lacey in the back of the head. But Lacey is about to turn the tables. ‘Dime looked as if he were going to spit again, but instead swallowed. ‘You know why I’m here?” he asks… shortly before Lacey tricks him, stealing his car and gun. 

There are other subtleties in this book, too. When Jeremiah remembers the family of Vietnamese civilians he massacred in the war, he thinks ‘The girl was still beneath his feet’ – always, wherever he goes, beneath his feet.

In this broad-brush Mexican standoff of a book there is also marvellous detail like points of mica glowing in the mud. It is also a powerful novel of the wilderness, and the old lie that blood is thicker than water.

Posted in Fiction, Northern Hinterlands | 1 Comment »

Sentimental Education

November 7, 2023

Quoting Orwell on children’s books, Christopher Hitchens said:

what he found (in an essay called ‘Boys’ Weeklies’) was an extraordinary level of addiction to the form of story that was set in English boarding schools. Every week, boys (and girls) from the poorer quarters of industrial towns and from the outer edges of the English-speaking Empire would invest some part of their pocket-money to keep up with the adventures of Billy Bunter, Harry Wharton, Bob Cherry, Jack Blake and the other blazer-wearing denizens of Greyfriars and St. Jim’s. As he wrote:

‘It is quite clear that there are tens and scores of thousands of people to whom every detail of life at a ‘posh’ public school is wildly thrilling and romantic. They happen to be outside that mystic world of quadrangles and house-colors, but they can yearn after it, daydream about it, live mentally in it for hours at a stretch.’

The main body of that essay is about Harry Potter, another franchise selling the dream of a magical school that whisks talented children away from dull and impoverished lives. The film director John Hughes did something similar with his string of movies in the 1980s and Laurie Nunn, creator of Netflix’s Sex Education, drew inspiration from him. 

When I was growing up everyone loved John Hughes, but I could never stay awake through any of his films except Ferris Bueller. Sex Education was a difficult intro. The first two episodes were so annoying I was holding on for dear life. None of it made sense. Everyone sounded too posh. This bright beautiful town. This bright polished fun school where everyone gets to wear their own clothes, when in real life they’d have some horrible uniform (as indeed happens in season 3 when Hope takes over). The plot was silly. There’s a sixteen year old kid called Otis who is the son of sex therapists, but is sexually repressed. Maeve, who he is secretly in love with, suggests he start up his own sexology clinic to help the teenagers with their problems. So everyone starts paying for advice from this lad who has never had a sexual experience – even with himself.

At the end of episode three they end with a scene of Maeve sitting in her trailer, not speaking, and I realised there was something there. From that point Sex Education becomes unmissable. You get hooked into the stories of the various sixth formers as they desire and plot. The characters get fleshed out. Otis’s dad is a psychologist named Remi Milburn, absent for many years. Otis finds him at an event where he is promoting his book, ‘Is Masculinity in Crisis’? to an audience of mainly uncertain-looking young men. Afterwards the two go for a drink and Otis confronts Remi about his failings. For the first time, Remi becomes both self aware and honest. He tells his son:

You know, when you’re young… you think that everybody out there really… really gets you. But, you know, actually, only a handful of them do. All the people who like you, despite your faults. And then if you discard them, they will never come back. So when you meet those people… you should just hold on them. Really, really tightly. And don’t let them go. And whatever else you do [tapping a copy of his book] never read this fucking book.

At that point one of the lost-looking young men from the audience interrupts them to ask Remi for an autograph. Remi cheerfully signs the young guy’s copy of the worthless book. 

The school based stories are still absurd, but you begin to appreciate the setting more. There are incidental characters, bizarre performances, funny teachers, and the best cover of Peaches ‘Fuck The Pain Away’ you’ve ever heard. Moordale is fun, and everybody’s welcome. Headmaster Mr Groff has a breakdown and loses his position, and is replaced by professional young educator Hope Haddon. While Michael Groff was old fashioned, but ruled with a light touch, Hope is a modern authoritarian who imposes an abstinence-only curriculum, which doesn’t go down well. Her control of the school ends in scandal and the school being closed down. 

At that point the series could, maybe should have ended. The final season was its least popular. Moordale was replaced by Cavendish, run from below by a supremely annoying trio of teenage progressives who will charge you for gossiping in front of them. We graduated from the sex school to the Sunday School of Woke, and it was a hard adjustment for many viewers. 

In a classic hatchet job the Guardian’s Lucy Mangan wrote:

If Sex Education were staying true to its early, far more radical roots, it might do more than just hint at the potential downsides of relentless positivity, but here the rule remains absolute affirmation only… Also dragging down the mood is the fact that everyone – and not just the rival sex therapist O (Thaddea Graham) who is already set up at Cavendish – use therapy speak at all times. Sex Education scripts used to be fleet and funny. Now everyone is earnest, delivering life lessons at every turn and making you long for the days when humour was still an honoured part of the human condition.

Yet the school genre has always sought to deliver moral instruction. Entertainment was almost secondary to that. When I was a kid I read everything by Enid Blyton, including the school stories, which always had a didacticism of varying subtlety. At some point one of the characters, in the afterglow of some test of her virtue, says to herself: ‘We learn more than lessons at Whytliffe School!’

Shaad D’Souza writes: ‘While the show has previously dealt with subjects such as abortion, discrimination and sexual assault, weightier than average for a teen drama, it’s darker than it’s ever been, siloing many of its core characters, such as Otis (Asa Butterfield), his mother, Jean (Gillian Anderson), his best friend, Eric (Ncuti Gatwa), and his love interest Maeve (Emma Mackey), in order to send them on their own journeys of strife and self-discovery.’ Nunn silos them off – and in many cases puts her characters through their own tests of virtue and responsibility just as Blyton did. Even Mr Groff the former headmaster is left to try and change and grow, in the wreck of his marriage and career. He cuts a sympathetic figure and is yet another lost soul in need of instruction. 

Conservatives hate stuff like Sex Education because they see it as indoctrination – and the wrong kind of indoctrination, at that. And I could never be told anything by anyone. But there was still some of that old exhilaration in the final season. There are some writers, educators, entertainers and professionals who are driven by the need to instruct and teach others – and if they sometimes get it wrong, well, this kind of education is better than it was in my day. 

As series creator Laurie Nunn said: ‘Things move so fast nowadays and there’s so much amazing TV out there. I’m always joking that my baby’s gonna get older and be like: ‘Oh no, Mum, you made that really problematic, really embarrassing sex show.”

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An Acquired Taste

November 6, 2023

Poor Matthew Perry. What went wrong for him? There are no clues in his formative years. No tyrannical father. No childhood trauma. No diagnosed mental health problems. Yet you know exactly what drove him to excess. Perry’s parents lived thousands of miles apart and he remembered flying alone from Ottawa as a child to see his dad. He would not feel safe until he could see the lights of Los Angeles rising to meet him. ‘But soon I would see the lights of the city and have a parent once more.’

Perry describes a lifelong sense of incompleteness and dislocation. He felt that there was a void inside him – one he had to fill with success, and applause, and with booze and opiates. This sense of incompleteness may stem from all those hours of lonely flights over the continental States. But that feeling of dislocation is basic human condition stuff. We all feel that we are lacking, illegitimate, or in Perry’s words ‘not enough’. (Don’t we?) If only in all those years of rehab and therapy someone had told him – or maybe they did and it didn’t sink in. For me, anyway, it’s something instantly identifiable. A therapist told Perry once that reality is an acquired taste. I knew what Perry meant as soon I read that line, and I also knew that the acquisition of such taste can be the work of a lifetime.

Every autobiography is a success story, Martin Amis said. Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing is not a success story. The poor man is like something out of F Scott Fitzgerald, or Bojack Horseman. Perry often breaks off the narrative to say something like: ‘During that time, I met at least five women that I could have married, had children with. Had I done so just once, I would not now be sitting in a huge house, overlooking the ocean, with no one to share it with, save a sober companion, a nurse, and a gardener twice a week – a gardener I would often run outside and give a hundred dollars to so he’d turn his fucking leaf blower off. (We can put a man on the moon, but we can’t invent a silent one of these things?)’ And, later: ‘Instead, I’m some schmuck who’s alone in his house at fifty-three, looking down at an unquiet ocean…’

Self pity is hard to take, particularly from the wealthy, but there’s no point in Perry’s memoir where you feel he’s asking you to feel sorry for him. The style is too self aware and funny and candid for that. Even the really terrible lines (‘My colon exploded’, ‘I’m a drug addict, I did some drugs, that’s what we do!’) you will hear them in the voice of Chandler Bing, and Perry of course knows this. He fell in love with his character and indeed reading this book I realised for the first time the weight the right actor can bring to a character. The tragedy of Perry’s life, as he says, is that the character had surpassed him: ‘It was not lost on me that Chandler had grown up way faster than I had.’

Anyway, how has Friends aged? There’s a fascinating discussion, one that social media has yet to address. I tried to watch the series through last year and stalled at season five. I never thought it was the same since Chandler and Monica got together – not because the characters lost their spark but because the whole show felt too polished and professional. People say Friends was too white, but that’s true of most TV in the nineties. At its worst Friends was a despotism of social norms – the main group are these shiny happy people and the humour came from their interactions with various wacky people outside their group.

The Atlantic’s Megan Garber said:

I don’t love that they tend to make the people outside the universe the butt of the jokes. You’ve got the core people. And then you have the side characters and dating interests who cycle through their lives. And typically, it’s those outsiders who get the brunt of the jokes. They’re expendable and therefore the most mockable, which is not a great dynamic.

Having said that, at least Friends was good at eccentrics and grotesques: Patrick Kerr’s wonderful turn as the creepy restauranteur, Chandler’s disturbed housemate Eddie, Phoebe’s brother Frank, Mr Heckles and Janice and even Jack Geller. (‘A woman who works in my office is a lesbian. I’m just saying!’) The early seasons are the best because they’re hanging out in their apartments together and having a laugh (Monica’s apartment is unrealistically large – has anyone mentioned that?) and it makes you think of when you were in your early twenties and spent lazy afternoons watching the show with your friends, because all of you had nothing but time on your hands. It was such a chilled, witty vibe and we had the drama of Ross and Rachel’s on-off relationship. As the Twitter account ‘what a weird week’ said, their love story was completely misaligned. ‘Everything is ALWAYS fraught. Fighting, jealousy, possessiveness, drama. Their relationship looks EXHAUSTING.’ Chandler and Monica were the more natural couple, but Ross and Rachel – whether in each other’s arms, or at each other’s throats – captivated us more.

So I feel bad for Matthew Perry, sad that he died alone, probably in that same big empty house by an unquiet ocean. I never shared Perry’s faith in God or the higher power but I do hope that if there is a place that we walk after we die, that that walkway has a star with his name on, and that there are city lights rising to meet him. For men of a certain age, Perry’s premature death could not, uh, be more poignant. 


(Image: Wiki)

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The Artefact

June 17, 2023

In Stephen King’s The Tommyknockers there is a spaceship buried in the woods of a small New England town. The ship has been under the earth for hundreds of years, its occupants long dead. Yet as townsfolk get curious and start digging up the alien artefact, its radiation seeps out and wreaks dramatic changes on people around. Not even HG Wells, one of the diggers reflects, predicted an invasion of ghosts.

For Frank Landau in Nina Allan‘s Conquest the ghosts have been here for a long time. Frank hangs out on UFO forums. Frank believes that he is being watched by people he calls ‘the n-men’. Frank’s paranoid. He prefers the postal service to email, because to his mind it is

Like sending an email in slow motion, the slow spray of data through the fabric of space, a burgeoning of spores like the vortex of midges that swarmed the copse at twilight or after rain.

Frank’s thoughts are structured like this, measured and beautiful, but often his anxiety takes over, pressuring his words, so the prose deteriorates into panicky run-on sentences:

For Frank the anxiety of knowing he was under surveillance was less than the anxiety of being spied on in secret. You could even say there was something energising in knowing for sure, a sense of forward momentum even of power yet he knew he should be careful not so much of them as of himself the ceaseless careless spooling of his unguarded thoughts. 

Frank’s problem is diagnosed as generalised anxiety disorder. He’s been in and out of locked psychiatric wards since the age of fourteen. Despite this great psychological drag, Frank has a lot going for him. He can code, well enough to earn a freelance living. He still lives with his mum because he is afraid of change, but there’s a lot of love there and he is an active participant in his family. He has a girlfriend, Rachel, who can get past his craziness because she loves him. Frank doesn’t have the monomania of the typical conspiracy theorist. His brother Michael describes going to a UFO conference and being struck by ‘the way the speakers seemed to take it for granted that everyone in the audience thought the same way they did, that they all knew the truth and anyone who didn’t agree with them was either an idiot sheep or part of the conspiracy.’ Frank is never like this – he doesn’t force his ideas on others, they are not at the forefront of his conversation, they are more like a quiet hum in the background. Michael also says: ‘I could never get my head round it, the way he could be perfectly normal, sitting there having a pint and laughing about some show he’d seen on TV and yet all the time he’d be having these thoughts, these beliefs that stood completely outside the way most people see the world.’

Frank’s key text is a novel called The Tower, written by an ex serviceman named John C Sylvester in the 1950s. It is an SF novel in which the Earth has concluded a war with a distant civilisation called ‘Gliese’ – concluded successfully, though at great human cost. A New York architect named Archimbaud Aspen wants to build a gigantic tower to mark Earth’s victory over the aliens. It is called the Conquest Tower and Aspen sees it as ‘a city within the city, an exclusive gated community that would function as a magnet for trade and an advertisement for its creator’s planet-sized ambition.’ Aspen’s big talking point is that he wants to build the tower from stone imported from the ruins of the defeated Gliese. This stone, unfortunately, is not ordinary stone. The artisans who build Conquest Tower ‘spoke of the malleability of the stone, or the stone ‘knowing what it was doing’, of the affinity they felt for it even’. Aspen himself is a paragon of self-confidence. His fluent vision drives the project to success. Yet once the tower is actually built and he is living in it, Aspen starts having bad dreams – and in these dreams it is New York in ruins, a burning wartime hellscape, and alien soldiers are chasing him. Aspen’s faithful PA Sidney Kruger notices a change in him: ‘an increasing propensity for small mistakes.’ Aspen is afraid to leave the building because this makes him feel like ‘whole aspects of himself were coming adrift, releasing themselves from their moorings and unspooling inside his brain.’ The problem – understated but obvious – is that the stone itself is alive. 

After twenty years of a settled life, Frank takes a trip abroad for the first time, to Paris to meet fellow enthusiasts from the UFO forum. Nine months later, he hasn’t come back, or made contact in any way. Sick with worry, Rachel hires a private detective, Robin Clay. Robin begins to unravel the mystery of Frank’s disappearance. The more conventional parts of the novel are about Robin’s investigation in the present, and her interrogation of the past. She is uncovering something huge, and so are we. Reading Conquest is to be in thrall to a evolving mystery, colossal and gorgeous. It is the kind of novel that defies analysis. In the face of Allan’s spectacular horizons the critical part of your brain just short-circuits, leaving you to enjoy the book on a deeper level. 

Disappointments? Longueurs? Sure. Allan includes lengthy essays from Frank’s friends on the UFO forum, which are beautifully written but also annoying because they make explicit the themes already so well developed in the story sequences. The precocious legend of Frank Landau gets irritating after a while – he is compared to a medieval saint near the end of the book, and by this point you agree with Robin’s advice to Rachel: ‘You have already given twenty years of your life to him. You need to think about yourself, about your future.’ Among their commonalities, the characters have a fondness for Bach, talk about him endlessly, comparing different recordings, the language of music is key, but again we already understand this, just from Frank’s early lines: ‘Words were slippery… So unlike code, or music, which had to be rendered perfectly or it wouldn’t run.’ Allan’s prose is so brilliant and well thought out you can understand the connection with music altogether, and I wonder if she actually based some of her sentences on the Goldberg Variations, as Thomas Harris was said to.

Whatever Allan was doing, it has worked. It’s rare that you read a book that makes you feel you’re a different person after finishing it.

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Unserious People

May 30, 2023

(Spoilers for entire series)

Here is a passage from Terry Pratchett that comes to mind when I think about Succession.

Six Beneficent Winds suddenly remembered, as a child, playing Shibo Yangcong-san with his grandfather. The old man always won. No matter how carefully he’d assembled his strategy, he’d find Grandfather would place a tile quite innocently right in the crucial place just before he could make his big move. The ancestor had spent his whole life playing shibo. The fight was just like that. 

Logan Roy always wins. His son, Kendall, plots to take over his billion-dollar media empire, but every attempt fails. A board vote doesn’t work. A hostile takeover doesn’t work. Kendall’s bombshell press conference at the end of season two certainly rattled the old man for a while, and put him on the back foot… but it didn’t cost Logan the company, which remained his until the end of his life. As Logan likes to say: ‘I fucking win.’

Succession is a dark comedy about the failed attempts of Kendall and his brothers to take over the empire their father started. It never took a genius to see that the brothers and sister wanted Waystar but also wanted other things from their dad – his love, support and approval. But in the world of Succession love is conditional. 

Marty Byrde in the crime drama Ozark thinks of love as conditional. He resents his wife’s affair because of the sacrifices he himself made for his marriage and family – hard work, years of faithfulness, ‘Marty Byrde, putting presents under the tree since 2002.’ It’s not just entitlement that motivates him. Marty feels that he has to be constantly ‘providing’ to be worthy of love, a pathology that took hold in his own childhood, when his father died of pancreatic cancer and left Marty and his mother penniless. Whatever, the idea of not being needed (and thus loved) is unmooring for him. Marty’s uncharacteristic loss of temper in season four springs not only from his fractious marriage and perilous situation but also from the meeting with his son Jonah earlier in the episode. Jonah is by this point living in a motel, making his own money and doesn’t even need Marty to drive him to school – the kid has a bike for that. (The bicycle appears in the opening O symbol intro for that episode, just below a drawing of Marty’s clenched fist.)

Logan’s situation is less stressful. He doesn’t need love because he’s learned to live without it from an early age, and he doesn’t care about his legacy, because he can’t imagine a world in which he isn’t alive. ‘Everything is moving,’ he tells Shiv, and that’s what Logan’s life is about: movement, and momentum. He is afraid, nevertheless, that his children will steal his life’s work, or perhaps seek to end his life altogether. (When Kendall makes a meal for him Logan offers a portion of the food to Kendall’s own son, to rule out poisoning.) Day to day, Logan makes considerable effort to keep them fighting each other rather than teaming up against Logan himself.

It’s surprising how successful this strategy proves. Shiv has built a successful career outside the family, running campaigns for candidates whose politics her father abhors. Yet she junks it for a nod and a wink from Logan. (Even Shiv’s look changes dramatically once she believes she is in the running; she goes from season one’s messy hair and big jumpers to the more corporate and streamlined look almost overnight.) Kendall is the strongest threat to Logan’s position so he needs a harder line. Season two is one long demonstration of Logan’s power over Kendall. Logan makes Kendall cut his rehab short to defend his father on the news. Logan makes Kendall gut his favourite acquisition because you have to kill what you love to prove your loyalty to Logan Roy. 

‘As a concept, ‘the family’ has worked even harder than ‘the individual’ to overshadow our ethical obligations to other people,’ writes Zoe Hu. Over the series we’ve seen what the Roys do to each other, and to the lesser one per centers in their orbit. Think of all the people who enjoy big arcs in Waystar world only to suddenly, inexplicably disappear: Roman’s girlfriend Tabitha and his former partner Grace (storms out of a Thanksgiving, never to return) Kendall’s PA Comfrey, Logan’s girlfriend Carrie, riding the subway back to her little apartment. Inflitrating the Roy Inner Ring takes effort and surviving there takes more. Small town company man Tom Wambsgans made a good move in marrying Shiv: ‘You married me for my DNA,’ she later tells him, accurately. When he realised that the marriage did not guarantee advancement or even fidelity on Shiv’s part, Tom pivoted to Logan. He became Logan’s conduit to what Shiv was thinking, and even offered to go to prison on the old man’s behalf. Unlike with Greg, who in his way is just as terrible, I never warmed to Tom Wambsgans. (Wasn’t there a character in Balzac who ‘would have paid for the pleasure of selling himself?’)

What the Roys do to ordinary people is even worse. Consider the death of Andrew Dodds, a waiter at Shiv’s wedding. Lots of people killed Dodds, and his death is foreshadowed: Shiv makes a joke about killing a stripper, and Roman demonstrates a similar failure of responsibility in his satellite launch, which detonates on a smartphone screen before his eyes. The workers on the satellite launch escape death, but Andrew Dodds was not so lucky. Logan fired him from the catering team, after he interrupted the old man at a stressful moment; Greg pointed him out to Kendall as a potential source of drugs; Kendall drove Dodds into the dark country road by the river. Dodds himself had agency in his own death because he grabbed the wheel to avoid the deer. Jeremy Strong’s acting is just fantastic in the aftermath: Kendall surfaces from the river, returns to the water in an attempt to save Dodds, then gives the waiter up for dead. He jogs back to the castle, hides behind a tree to avoid being seen from a passing car, then sneaks back into the castle in his wet clothes, fireworks going off as he struggles through an open field. Kendall wakes up the next day and you see the memory hit him. He picks up his phone, then you see him realise that searching for news on a smartphone could be incriminating, so he just turns on the radio, which plays crackly gibberish. You see every thought of Kendall’s cross the actor’s face. 

At best, Logan has a patrician fondness for ordinary people. Leaving the modest home of the Dodds family, he tells Kendall: ‘We give them a laugh, bit of telly, news that doesn’t talk down to them. Nice fucking people, decent fucking folk.’ Cross the Roys, though, and you can go from decent fucking folk to an NRPI. In the shadow logs of Waystar cruises, this nasty acronym denotes a victim who is unconnected to the Roys, or to anybody important, and is therefore of no consequence. Logan even says this himself, of Andrew Dodds: ‘No real person involved.’ This sets up a dividing line between father and son. Despite all his flaws, Kendall does feel remorse for Dodds, the people at Vaulter that he fired and the people raped and murdered on the Waystar cruises. Logan finds about Dodds because he has a Mike Ehrmantraut-style cleaner who found the evidence, connected the dots and cleared the crime scene. When Kendall invades the Waystar town hall in season 3, a woke prince in revolt against his father’s empire, the cleaner appears again and tells him: I know you. (In the final scene of the series, when Kendall wanders off, devastated, to the river, is the ‘cleaner’ the mysterious figure in the suit who follows Kendall to the dock and stands by him? You know, I think it might be.) 

In Money by Martin Amis (dead now, o Discordia) he writes that ‘London is full of short stories, long stories, epics, farces, sitcoms, sagas, soaps and squibs, walking around hand in hand.’ The protagonist, John Self, is trying to make a movie, but is stymied by the various stars, all narcissists who have a fixed idea of how they want to be seen by the world. And the drama is secretly controlled by a villain who is high on the idea of his own victimhood. You’re bound to get drama, Self reflects, when you deal with people who want to write their own lives. 

Logan has his own narrative of a self made man who started with nothing and built the gigantic Waystar corporation. His children all want to be part of that story to some degree. The siblings oppose Kendall’s hostile takeover, even though they would gain vast fortunes by going along. ‘We’re somebodies now,’ says Connor Roy. ‘Any doofus can have a few million bucks.’ It’s not just power but the idea of being part of something. The more money and power we have, the greater our chances of imprinting ourselves on the world, making the world see ourselves as we would like to be seen. That is why Kendall, among his other addictions, can’t quit the family drama. His fortieth birthday attracts the city’s biggest names but all Kendall cares about is whether his brothers and sister will be coming. Doing methamphetamine with a bunch of guys he met in a bar in New Mexico, Kendall gets along with the methheads until they start riffing on his background, and at this point Kendall gets self conscious and calls Roman to pick him up. He hates his family sometimes but ultimately feels lost without them. 

‘A rich kid kills a boy,’ Logan tells Kendall, ‘and that’s all he’ll ever be.’ He lays down the choice: Kendall can own up to what he’s done and ruin the memory of Shiv’s wedding and maybe go to prison. Alternatively, Logan sketches out a brighter scenario: ‘in which father and son are reconciled.’ Kendall is part of Logan’s story or he is nothing, just a drug addict guilty of manslaughter. Shiv has her father’s gift of persuasion. She convinces Kira, a Waystar whistleblower, that if she testifies against the company’s evil deeds, that is all she will be remembered for: ‘the first line of your obituary.’ Shiv is kinder than Logan, though, in which she leaves open a possible future for Kira outside the Waystar orbit, not just reconciliation to her place within it. 

All this is to answer a question I always had watching the show: why do they bother? With the wealth they must have as Logan’s children, which would allow them to do anything with their lives, it confounds me that Kendall, Roman and Shiv spent so much time and energy on Waystar Royco. I do not include Connor in this, the eldest son, commonly known as the stupidest Roy but also in a sense the wisest of them, because he had the sense to remove himself far from the corporate action. Connor is in Hannah Mackay’s words ‘a middle-aged libertarian drop-out’ but at least in the final season, he has a degree of independence and self-awareness the others lack. He has his place in New Mexico, a wife with some affection for him, and at least one friend, liberal counterpart Maxim Pierce – you can imagine them sitting up at nights drinking very expensive wine and arguing about Napoleon. The other Roys don’t seem to have anybody beyond their circle (Kendall at least has a family of his own, but has alienated them almost entirely by end series). Poverty is a curse but privilege too has the power to destroy us and make prisons of human lives. 

This is really brought home at the end of season three when Kendall, Roman and Shiv discover that Logan is selling the company out from under them. Kendall has the idea to persuade their mother Lady Caroline to use her board votes to block the deal. However, Logan has already learned about this gambit and blocked it: he persuades Caroline to vote his way, in exchange for a peerage to her new husband. The kids race to Logan’s villa only to find the deal all worked out without them – without sympathy, Logan informs them that he has sold their birthright. The aghast expressions on the face of his sons and daughter are truly haunting, not the faces of adults but those described by W H Auden:

Lest we should see where we are 

Lost in a haunted wood,

Children afraid of the night

Who have never been happy or good.

Why did we love Succession? Part of it (come on) was the opulence of it, the idea of seeing how very rich and important people live. Another part of it was the vulnerability of the characters, and the sense of lives predating the show. There are so many mysteries and secrets that we never get to the bottom of, and the seamless flow of argument and conversation between the characters, their in jokes and old wounds, gave us the sense that this was a real family – not serious perhaps, but real. As set decorator Sophie Newman told The Ringer: ‘nothing is new. Everything has a personality, has a history and a provenance… That’s the key, is that it’s layered.’ Layered.

Posted in Fiction, Relationships | 4 Comments »

Low Light

February 6, 2023

Every man’s death diminishes us, it’s said. Narrator JJ has been diminished more than most. Their first great love, Thomas James, has died suddenly aged twenty seven. Now in Mexico City on a leap day JJ is moved to write the story of their affair. 

Here’s another cliche: beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Thomas James is energetic and handsome but still, it’s hard to work out what JJ sees in him. Thomas is a photographer’s assistant obsessed with Morrissey and Soviet brutalism. He is cruel and bigoted. I don’t recall, from the dialogue, that he has a kind word for anyone. The nastiness of his behaviour and speech makes a nice ironic contrast with the tender lyricism JJ uses to describe him. 

Perhaps it’s the attraction of opposites – a third cliche, but Martin Amis said that love makes cliches of us all. JJ as a person is everything that Thomas James is not – erudite, sensitive and politically engaged. They are by far the more interesting of the two lovers. Their narration is high camp with touches of modernism and religious grandeur – I felt at times I was reading the diaries of Teddy Thursby, Jake Arnott‘s dissolute peer of the 1960s. Wry observations end in assertions so pretentious they near make you laugh out loud. Take this: ‘SF is not a place, not really, it’s more a state of mind, an overlapping, a fault line from where you can hear the sighs of the unavenged Ohlone, Asia’s golden gates swinging open, the last startled gasp of the Viceroy.’ Or: ‘I’m sad that I’ll never get to see you in the newspapers collecting an award, and strike up a cigarette, startle my maid and mutter to myself, ‘Putain!’ with my eyes still full of desire.’ (JJ also says come as ‘cum’… transgressive, no?)

It is all in perception. Soon after Thomas has died JJ sees an artwork called Der Unfall at the Whitechapel gallery – ‘a strange turquoise black whirligig… four wagons colliding’ or ‘one wagon flying outwards in four directions’. The work’s ‘ominous logic and centrifugal force’ freaks JJ out, ‘as if the ominous white figure-eight at the centre of the accident were a void in which I was hurtling head-first.’ Near the end, a video work by Bruce Nauman provides much the same effect: ‘projectors threw the same image onto the floor and onto the wall in front of us, of two figures in black, rolling away from each other whilst reaching towards each other… They were two pairs of sirens, a quaternity, calling me into the whirlpool, like a deadly mirage composed of my own paranoiac desires.’

JJ was told by their mother that ‘I live my life like a sunbather in the park, forever moving the blanket to chase the sun’. JJ’s room in Mexico ‘never fully catches the sun’. Thomas’s bedroom has ‘a cantankerous set of vertical blinds that would never descend, so the room was never more than murky, with light spilling in from all the restaurants in the streets below.’ Falling into bed at dawn with a Californian lover, JJ wishes ‘at any point in the past three months, we had taken the time to put his bedroom curtains back up.’ There’s a word, used early on, that describes At Certain Points We Touch: crepuscular. Wherever JJ goes, the light isn’t quite clear. 

The story draws towards Thomas James and then is repelled from him like the two dancing shadows in the Nauman projection. JJ and Thomas meet up, have wild crazy sex, and argue, at which point JJ disappears across the sea to New York or San Francisco. The American passages are the best part of this story because in America JJ is always with friends. They live off booze and drugs and cheap 24 hour cafe food, off burlesque gigs and cash-in-hand jobs found on internet messageboards. JJ is trying to achieve something, get into the middle of something, but we don’t know what. The spirit of it is warm and indubitable. As JJ says, speaking simply for once: ‘We just knew we were searching for something more than the hand dealt us offered.’

JJ’s return to London is not so much fun. JJ of course has a scene there, centred around a horrible pub called the Joiners. There’s a lovely old guy called Jovian who runs an open mic night and acts as a sort of counsellor to the others (”We told people ridiculous stories, that he was my father, or that we were working together, ghost-writing the memoirs of the last great Warhol starlet, Jackie Jackie Pizza Hut.’) But worries about money and rent are never far from anybody’s mind, and in London Thomas’s dour spectre overshadows everything. JJ begins to exhaust the patience of his friends. The city seems to get smaller and harder as the novel goes on. Street harassment is a fact of life for gay and trans people, and in this book it’s always in the background, easily ignored. Until Thomas’s death, when JJ and Adam meet on a bridge. When Adam starts crying with grief, a group of passing lads laugh at him. It is an evocation of an accepted negativity suddenly really getting to you, and at that moment JJ’s horrible Lancashire childhood suddenly seems a lot closer.

Lauren John Joseph‘s narrative touches upon theoretical physics, the nature of existence and observation, and it’s all very interesting, it all relates to this story of two lovers who, no matter how close they got, could never really know each other, and clearly these lessons are not just for JJ and Thomas. Still, maybe it’s a joke, an irony, but I can’t help wanting Thomas to have been a little more interesting. What the hell, the heart wants what it wants. Unreflexive desire is shot through this novel – either the last of a certain kind of radical writing, or the beginning of something new. 

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Men Sell Not Such In Any Town

December 29, 2022
Backwards up the mossy glen
Turn’d and troop’d the goblin men,
With their shrill repeated cry,
‘Come buy, come buy.’
When they reach’d where Laura was
They stood stock still upon the moss,
Leering at each other,
Brother with queer brother;
Signalling each other,
Brother with sly brother.
 
The wicked merchants of Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’ bewitch people with their magical fruit: ‘Apples and quinces, Lemons and oranges, Plump unpeck’d cherries, Melons and raspberries, Bloom-down-cheek’d peaches, Swart-headed mulberries’. The fruit tastes so good it’s addictive; users come back for more only to find that the goblins have vanished. The unfortunate customer ‘Sought them by night and day, Found them no more, but dwindled and grew grey, Then fell with the first snow.’
 
My edition of Rossetti’s selected poems says that there is no allegorical content to ‘Goblin Market’ – Rossetti just wanted to write a narrative verse. JK Rowling uses the poem as an epigraph in her novel The Ink Black Heart, which is about the dark side of virtual worlds. The Victorian phrasing clashes with Rowling’s modern crime thriller, but you can read the resonances all the same. Social media addicts spend more and more time on constant broadcast, chasing that dopamine high, the taste of magical fruit. The sites themselves are full of fanatics, grifters, conmen and bad actors – signalling each other, brother with sly brother.
 
Nick Cohen makes the case against Twitter here. It encourages groupthink and high emotion at the expense of depth and complexity. And it’s particularly bad for writers. ‘For today’s writers,’ Nick says, ‘social media is now the prime distraction and the foremost enemy of promise.’
 
I must disagree with Nick on this occasion. While acknowledging the dark side of social media, I think overall that Big Tech is the greatest gift that global markets have left to an ungrateful nation. 
 
The narrative against Big Tech comes from boomers. They don’t understand it, they don’t like it but they’ve got to engage because the publisher tells them to. It’s the ‘do it to say you’ve done it’ imperative from which the disillusionment comes. It’s hard to take a step back and realise how much the bitterness dominates thinking about technology. One of the best novels I read this year was Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House, in which an inventor works out how to actually externalise the human consciousness – put it into an interface that contains actual human memories. The Candy House is thoughtful, compulsive, dazzling and could never have been written by a British author (and if it had would just have been rejigged as an obvious satire). 
 
No disrespect to old people. I mean, I’m old. But maybe you have to be a Gen Xer to understand. 
 
It’s the little things really. Imagine waiting for a bus without having an iPhone to check your emails. Imagine the crimes that would have gone unpunished without street footage captured on smartphone cameras. The suicides that would have happened without a stranger reaching out. People I’ve known kept indoors, or living in social deserts, whose loneliness has been alleviated by Facebook and Twitter. Could you imagine the lockdowns in, say, 1992? Could we have survived the pandemic without social media, as annoying as it was?
 
Oh, the dopamine has long since burned out. When I first got onto Twitter in the 2010s you could log on at any given time and see a post that would make you reconsider your beliefs, or laugh out loud in the street. Now, as Nick says, it’s full of careerist bores with blue ticks. I thought that Musk’s takeover at least meant the bores would clear off. We get a lot more adverts for Saudi megacities, Tom Hanks and gold exchanges. But the bores are still there. They just have Mastodon strings in their profile names.
 
One of Nick’s problems with Twitter is that it devalues longform content:
The bitter truth is that the ungrateful swine don’t click. A study of 200 US news publishers from 2016 found that Twitter generated ‘1.5 percent of traffic for typical news organizations’. At the same time a joint study by Columbia University and the French National Institute concluded that your tweet may go viral but your content may not be read.
 
So how do we get people to actually read the content – stuff that matters? One idea that Nick and others have taken up is to do substacks, with much of the content subscriber only. But then, who’s going to read all these substacks? I read Jesse Singal‘s and Leyla Sanai‘s. I’d encourage you to get paid subscriptions, to theirs and to Nick’s, if you can afford it. But who is going to pay the rest of these subscriptions? The coffee house of the Republic of Letters never used to charge admission. And longform content isn’t necessarily good content. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Unherd essay mill.
 
Meanwhile, don’t worry – all the posts on this blog will stay free, which would mean something if the blog was ever updated. 

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Death on Staircase 7

November 8, 2022

The Oxbridge education is overrated. Or so it must feel to Hannah Jones. Ten years on from beginning her degree in one of Oxford’s best colleges, she is working in a bookshop, worried about money, pursued by journalists and living with a handsome but distant husband.

It all held so much promise. Ruth Ware says that ‘writing about Oxford is a particular kind of challenge – it’s been novelised so frequently and so well that it feels slightly hubristic to add to the pile of books about the college experience.’ Yet the Oxford parts of the novel are among some of Ware’s best passages. The students are recognisably 2010s students, modern and idiosyncratic, but they do not seem grafted on to the old-time college with its buildings, landscape, traditions and rules. The relationship between town and college is deftly drawn, and there’s a sense of ancient magic you must have felt if you ever studied at such a place – something that mixes in with the everyday quotidian murmur. This is Hannah getting back to accommodation on a rainy night:

Under the arch of staircase 7 she folded her umbrella, shook off the worst of the water, and made her way slowly up the stairs. Behind each door was a different sound. The silence of study; the laughter of friends congregating; the quiet thump of someone’s music, the volume just slightly too low for Hannah to recognise the song.

Hannah’s time at college was brought to an ugly close by the murder of her best friend, April Clarke-Cliveden. April is the ‘It Girl’ of the title and another of the book’s strengths. There is a tendency in crime fiction to freeze the victims in the moment of their death – the body is found in the prologue, you never get to know them as people, they are basically wall martyrs. But April is a vivid presence throughout. She is vivacious, funny and smart. She is the legendary undergraduate who can go out partying until dawn and still be fresh for the seminar room. When Hannah revisits Oxford ten years later, she finds that their old rooms have been turned into office space. But you can still feel traces of April’s personality there.

April can be arrogant, entitled, even cruel. But there is a heart to her. She puts real effort into her friendship with Hannah – who, frankly, can be a drag and a bore – but April adopts her, encourages confidence in Hannah, builds her up, with no real vested interest in doing so, for no more reason than that she sees things in people. And when April is killed, it’s like part of Hannah dies with her. She retreats to her childhood bedroom, spends years reading letters from her contemporaries, her own drives and ambitions shrinking.

April’s murder is a classic locked room mystery: she is killed in the ‘set’ (a kind of bedsit she shares with Hannah) that has only one way in and out, through the stairwell. A porter named John Neville is convicted of her murder on the strength of Hannah’s testimony – she saw him exit the stairway at the time of her death. Day to day, Neville is an irritation and a creep – he is always messing with Hannah’s head, coming into her room on small pretexts, seeing how far he can push the boundaries. He dies in prison protesting his innocence, and as much as Hannah disliked Neville, she’s always been haunted by the possibility that she sent him to jail, unjustly. 

In a murder mystery there must be the sense that things are going on behind the scenes that you don’t know about. The little Pelham college is crowded and incestuous, you think you can see all the betrayals and love triangles that are going on, but it’s unlikely you’ll know the whole truth, not until right at the end. Ware understands how to convey secrets and lies inside small, intelligent groups. The college itself seems to have more secret passages than a Cluedo board. Pelham is walled, but there’s a place you can climb over. There is a fine eerie touch to the stairwell Hannah and April use to get into their building – its lights run on sensors, so after sunset you have to walk, and climb into the dark for a moment, before the light recognises your presence and clicks on. 

The It Girl is a long book, perhaps too long, and earnest and ponderous sometimes. But there is a real storytelling engine here, that kicks in so quietly you don’t notice it, then builds to a good, confident pace. Our goody-goody protagonist Hannah has nothing to go on except her intuitions and doubts, and the narrative reflects that, meandering from place to place. But Hannah turns out to be made of stern stuff, and a fine detective in her own right. The end, and how she gets there, is a genuine shocker. Death waits in the garden, but glory is waiting there too.

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Something Wicked

August 17, 2022

(Spoiler alert for entire series of Better Call Saul)

‘The obvious road is almost always the fool’s road. And beware the middle road, the road of moderation, common sense and careful planning.’

– William Burroughs

‘Seriously, when the going gets tough, you don’t want a criminal lawyer… You want a criminal lawyer.’

– Jesse Pinkman

Somewhere in Albuquerque, New Mexico, there is a marquee tent in a field after darkness. Crowds of people stream towards and around it, a certain kind of crowd that loves life after dark. The hustlers and ravers, bikers and goths, drug fiends and lost souls. Inside the tent itself there’s no circus, just a man in a sharp, colourful suit, an attorney who up until recently practiced under the name Jimmy McGill. After a year’s suspension he’s reinvented himself as ‘Saul Goodman’ and has erected his tent to give away drop phones and pitch his business to the night crowd. He establishes rapport with potential clients, brags about his legal victories, grossly exaggerates them – the scene is something out of a dark carnival on the edge of town: something wicked this way comes.

At the end of the night, his bodyguard Huell says: ‘Well done, magic man.’ Saul replies: ‘We’re just getting started.’

Breaking Bad was about the persistence of magic in the modern age. The villain of Stephen King’s The Stand is described as ‘the last magician of rational thought.’ That’s an apt phrase for Walter White as well. His story is a bitter one about pride and unused talent. Yet even though he’s a failed scientist and high school chemistry teacher, he can do things that seem impossible – build a car battery out of nothing, cut through reinforced locks, synthesise poison from coffee beans. He has an uncanny ability to turn the tables even from an impossible position. He is an accomplished manipulator, who can change others’ perception of reality. Magic is sometimes alluded to in the series. Jesse Pinkman entertains Andrea’s son Brock with magic tricks, and then tells him: ‘That’s science, yo’ – but to Brock it’s indistinguishable from magic. Skyler admits to Walt during a furious marital row that ‘I don’t have your magic’. The very state of Mexico, of course, is known as the ‘Land of Enchantment’.

While he can’t match Walter’s meticulous nature and scientific expertise, Saul does have one thing his client lacks: charm. Even his disapproving older brother Chuck must admit early on that ‘Jimmy has a way with people.’ And Jimmy is equal with his charm, everyone deserves a good impression from him, whether they’re a prisoner in courthouse lockup or an old lady on a coach in Amarillo (‘Edison – like the inventor?’ ‘Beautiful penmanship – a lost art!’) Chuck is suspicious of Jimmy’s charm in part because he could never replicate it and also because he knows that charm has a dark twin – persuasion.

Charles and Jimmy McGill have the legal profession in common but not much else. Charles is everything that Jimmy is not: disciplined, rule-bound, grave and meticulous and successful. Law has the same defining, shaping meaning in Chuck’s life as science did for Walter White: it is like the gas lantern that Chuck carries around his house, a guiding light in a dark world. The law is sacred – Jimmy just can’t be trusted with it. ‘I know what you were, what you are,’ he says. ‘People don’t change. You’re Slippin’ Jimmy. And Slippin’ Jimmy I can handle just fine. But Slippin’ Jimmy with a law degree is like a chimp with a machine gun. The law is sacred! If you abuse that power, people get hurt. This is not a game.’

Chuck must know there is plenty of scope for persuasion in the day to day practice of law. We have known for this for a while. In his History of Europe, Richard Evans writes about the development of law as a profession:

Not surprisingly, lawyers were constantly campaigning against unqualified hucksters, known in Germany as Winkeladvokaten, or street-corner advocates, and in Italy as faccendieri, fixers. In the 1880s the Naples hall of justice was said to be like a flea market, with would-be lawyers advertising their services at every corner.

It seems that the regulation of legal practitioners, from its very early days, was drawn up with people like Saul Goodman in mind.

The respectable world seems to share Chuck’s opinion. Betsy Kettleman says it explicitly: ‘You’re the kind of lawyer guilty people hire.’ Jimmy can make people laugh in the legal world, but he can’t make them respect or approve of him, to them he will always be ‘Chuck McGill’s loser brother’. In the final series he’s ostracised by courthouse staff completely, the DA puts the word out: Jimmy has crossed a line that turns him from semi-tolerated guest to pariah. The resentment obviously fuelled his transformation into Saul Goodman, and there’s a moment in Breaking Bad when he strong-arms a more established attorney into selling his client’s house for less than half its value: you can see on Saul’s face how much he enjoyed outsmarting the conservative, disdainful older advocate.

Persuasion is all about the game. Persuasion is what got Socrates killed. Persuasion is how Jimmy McGill got his start as a small time conman – persuading people to hand over money for items that turn out to be worthless or even nonexistent. Persuasion is about creative interpretation, twisting the rules, dancing up to the line without quite crossing it. And persuasion brings in another concept Jimmy is fond of: showmanship. Showmanship is the suits, the ring, the LAWYRUP car, the inflatable Lady Liberty, and all the accoutrements of the Saul Goodman identity that Jimmy accumulates on the way. These things are not glammers (although they are that too) they are marks of Saul’s talent. And talent, Stephen King says, wants to be used.

This is where Kim comes in. As an attorney she seems more built in the Chuck mode: diligent and professional and quietly outstanding. But she shares with Jimmy a love of persuasion and mischief, a streak of something wicked that becomes the basis of their brief, passionate love affair. When interviewed by a new firm she relates her early life growing up in a small town in Nebraska. ‘What do you want?’ asks the law partner. ‘More,’ says Kim. She wants something that’s commensurate with her talents and the conservative blue chip ABQ law world is never going to offer that. The passion Jimmy and Kim have in common is the passion to be their own person, to work for themselves, not for a firm, a bank, a corporation or a cartel. Like Boyd Crowder in Justified, they are outlaws rather than criminals. The important thing for Jimmy and Kim is never to give up their independence – and they have a cautionary tale in Howard Hamlin, their boss at HHM, a comical, derided and ultimately tragic figure. 

The Game is not a hard thing to get into. During the first series – I mean, after Tuco’s calmed down – there is not much criminal activity at all. One episode begins with Jimmy sitting in a police station, there as Mike’s attorney, his back against a wall of fugitives. We pan down the wall of faces, knowing Jimmy’s likeness will one day be among them, and we linger on one: a guy called William Hill. Later, this same man rudely pushes past Jimmy to exit a cafe bathroom. The underworld is not obvious… but we always know it is there. 

The practice of law intersects with The Game of the criminal world. There are very few morally uncompromised people in Better Call Saul, and those minor characters – Ernesto, Irene Landry, Manuel Varga. Even Chuck is not above the dark arts. He spent years quietly undermining Jimmy before actively trying to drive him out of the profession in series two (which, of course, makes Jimmy all the more determined to hold on to a legal career that he’d considered giving up in the past.) Chuck is as devious as Jimmy and as proud as Walter White: he won’t admit he is mentally ill because he can’t face any potential threat to his intellect, the brilliant mind that built his success in life and won him the respect he felt cheated of by his more loveable little brother. Even the thought that he might have made a transposition error in client documentation sends Chuck into a tailspin. At the heart of it is pride but also a kind of terrible tough love. Chuck is convinced that Jimmy will do great harm to himself and others, and of course he is right… but whether this is fate or just determinism is something for us at home to puzzle over.

The road to hell is a crooked one. A common criticism of Better Call Saul is that it was too slow moving. Jimmy McGill doesn’t make a clear conscious decision to get into The Game. There is no great fall but a crooked path with plenty of switchbacks, do-overs, false starts and dead ends – a slow, fascinating meander. Donna Bowman of the AV Club also identifies what makes the show more interesting and more tragic: the absence of innate evil in Jimmy’s world. While there was always a dark heart to Walter White, for his lawyer the internal soundtrack is less intense: freestyle jazz.

But there is also a sense that Jimmy was doomed from the moment he tried to scam the Kettlemans, which put him on the cartel radar – and also gave him a grounding in trauma and violence, enabling him to push through the horror as it escalates and therefore helping him survive the Game. Mike tells him:

We all make our choices. And those choices, they put us on a road. Sometimes those choices seem small, but they put you on the road. You think about getting off… but eventually, you’re back on it. And the road we’re on led us out to the desert, everything that happened there and straight back to where we are right now. And nothing – nothing – can be done about that.

Mike Ehrmantraut acts as a kind of Zen counsellor to Saul and others. As the above quote shows, he’s a fatalist, and a hard man, particularly on himself. Nothing fazes Mike – he meets even his own violent death with a deadpan equanimity: ‘Shut the fuck up, Walter, and let me die in peace’ (and Walter, incredibly, does.) After his son’s death, for which he blames himself, for Mike life is all epilogue. Hank told Mike that ‘your departure from the Philadelphia police was… dramatic.’ We now know just how dramatic that departure was. But revenge doesn’t seem to have satisfied Mike. He’s still haunted by guilt and loneliness, and he can’t tell the difference between justice and vengeance. So why do we love him? Because Mike makes us laugh, as a laconic foil to Jimmy, and because of his stubborn belief that there are rules and ethics to the Game, things you do and don’t do. Jimmy is heading into the darkness. Mike already lives there.

The road is not just for Saul and Mike. Albuquerque is full of criminal dilettantes – the Kettlemans, Dan the steroid nerd, Gale Boetticher, even Werner Ziegler the engineer – who think they can get into the Game without negative consequences for themselves. They all pale in comparison to Walter White, the ultimate criminal amateur, who upends the ABQ underworld entirely and leaves scorched earth. As Mike rants to Walter in Breaking Bad: ‘We had a good thing, you stupid son of a bitch!… We had everything we needed, and it all ran like clockwork…. It was perfect. But, no, you just had to blow it up.’

The story of Heisenberg was about bitterness and pride but also regret. Even in the last episode of Better Call Saul Walter is still going on about the company he formed in graduate school, convinced that his college friends scammed him out of billions. Walter wants a legacy but he also wants to live the life he believed was denied him (he keeps Jesse around because he sees the younger man as his missing third child, the son and heir Walt never had). Walt bares his soul – as much as he ever bares his soul – to Saul about this, only for the lawyer to tell his own most profound regret: injuring his knee doing a slip-and-fall. To this Walt just says: ‘So you were always like this.’ 

Yes, he was always like this: an ordinary guy from a small town with a taste for mischief. And this is the story, the story of an ordinary man who grew up in the small town of Cicero, a man with a good heart and a streak of something wicked to him: a man who could have done anything he put his mind to, but who ended up, after a string of criminal adventures, serving life in federal prison. And it is the story of his one, brief, true love, a brilliant young woman who was equal to him in both law and persuasion, a woman who could have done amazing things and still might.

Series creator Vince Gilligan has ruled out a return to Albuquerque, so it’s goodbye to that world as well – ‘quite a ride,’ as Saul says. It really was a land of enchantment, and an immense pleasure to spend time there.

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